Dedicated to getting to the truth of things. A Christian since 1984. (Just a Christian, without pigeon-holing into a denomination.) I like people to be free to ask their questions about Christianity and the church. I like to approach faith questions with my brain switched on. A qualified classicist and historian.
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And I don't look like James Garner. Enough about me already.

Sunday, 21 May 2017

Mark’s resurrection narrative: where is it?

I come to be writing about the story of Jesus’ resurrection
in Mark’s Gospel in particular for one reason: the ending from Mark 16:9-20
which forms part of it, arguably shouldn’t be there at all. Some would argue
that case by saying that all that should be included at the end of Mark’s
Gospel are Mark’s own words, and that 16:9-20 are someone else’s words. Not
Mark’s words. And so they should be dismissed. And so, I’ve heard it claimed,
that leaves Mark’s Gospel without a resurrection account, or at least without mention of Jesus appearing to his disciples. But, I have to ask,
is that true? And how do we know?The question arises because in the most ancient manuscript evidence, Mark's Gospel ends at chapter 16:8. The signs are that extra verses were added later. Most modern bibles tell the reader so in the footnotes, so that the reader knows that Mark 16:9-20 was probably not originally part of Mark's Gospel. (There are other alternative endings too, but I'm trying to keep this simple.)

It matters not least because most experts would say that
Mark’s Gospel is our oldest gospel. This means, if you listen to some internet
voices especially, that the absence of a resurrection in the oldest gospel
means that the resurrection story was somehow invented after Mark wrote his
Gospel, with dire consequences for the truth of the resurrection and Christianity. in other words, so the claim goes, the first Christians didn’t believe
in a real resurrection of Jesus at all, and the sceptics think so because they think the resurrection wasn't originally in the earliest gospel. (This view ignores that Paul, writing earlier than Mark, had already mentioned the resurrection, but that's for another post, and I am keeping things simple here. This post is just about what Mark says.)

For the purpose of this post, I am going to dismiss Mark
16:9-20 out of hand[1],
simply in order to see what Mark really says without it. That is the test: if
we only go by Mark’s words, we can ask what they say – if anything – about Jesus
being resurrected.

So that leaves us only with Mark 16:1-8. This is what it
says in its resurrection episode:

When the Sabbath was over, Mary
Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might
go to anoint Jesus’ body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after
sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, “Who
will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” But when they looked
up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As
they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on
the right side, and they were alarmed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are
looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not
here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter,
‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told
you.’” Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb.
They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

And there it breaks off. If you were to add Mark 16:9-20 - and I won't do that here - then you get
stories in which is told what happens during appearances of the
resurrected Jesus to his disciples. But we don’t have that here. Now, I am
going to zoom in on what we do have here, in Mark 16:1-8, the words that are normally accepted by scholars as Mark's words. Some sceptics say there is no resurrection account here. But is that true? This is what we find in it.

In verse 2, we have, early on the Sunday, three women
visiting the tomb of Jesus.

In verse 4, the women witness that the stone had been rolled
away from the tomb entrance.

In verse 5, the women witness a man, a messenger in effect,
in the tomb.

In verse 6, this man tells them that Jesus, the one who had been
crucified, now ‘has risen!’

They witness that the tomb is otherwise empty, as the man
explains, “He is not here. See the place where they laid him.”

In verse 7, we learn where the resurrected Jesus will
appear, to whom and when: it will be the disciples and especially Peter, it will
be in Galilee after they arrive there. So resurrection appearance(s) are mentioned here, but not described.The messenger’s promise to be conveyed to Peter and the
others about what to expect in Galilee is, “There you will see him, just as he told you.” So the promised
appearance in Galilee links to something Jesus said earlier to them. (Mark’s Gospel is actually laced with the promise and expectation of Jesus’ resurrection. See Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:34 and especially Mark
14:28 about the promise of the risen Jesus going to Galilee.)In verse 8, the women run from the tomb in fear, and, we are
told, “They said nothing to anyone,” except of course that they obviously did
tell, otherwise their great moment at the tomb would not be found here. So we are
left anticipating the promised appearances of the risen Jesus in Galilee. In light of that story and promise, you can’t close the book
there and say that Mark doesn’t believe that. Mark is clearly a believer and clearly believes that the appearances of the risen Jesus in Galilee are bona fide. But we don’t get to hear more,
because that is where the text of Mark’s Gospel breaks off.

So after dismissing Mark 16:9-20, what do we have left here of the resurrection story in Mark? We have
this:

when: Sunday morning

where: the empty tomb

who is there: the women and a messenger

what: Jesus has risen

why: it is as Jesus foretold

what Jesus is doing now: “He is going ahead of
you into Galilee.”

what will happen: Jesus will appear

to whom he will appear: Peter and the disciples

where he will appear: Galilee

when he will appear: after they arrive in
Galilee.

That seems to me to be the basics of the resurrection story.
That is the story Mark tells. Mark in writing what he did clearly believed that the resurrection happened. To claim that there is no resurrection story in
Mark is spurious.

What is absent is the cued-up Galilee scene, and that is the
blank filled in by Mark 16:9-20. Without it, all you have is the basic
resurrection story, the empty tomb witnessed by the women, the message that Jesus
is resurrected, that Galilee is where the disciples will see the resurrected
Jesus appear to them. As said, resurrection appearance(s) are thus mentioned in Mark's Gospel, but not actually described: Mark is not in doubt that resurrection appearances are part of the story. It is a resurrection narrative, plain and simple, without the extras. To deny this, as some sceptics do, borders on desperation.

As NT Wright observes, one place where we find Mark's promised appearances of Jesus in Galilee is in the ending of Matthew's Gospel. And since Matthew re-uses 95% of the material provided to him by Mark, then this makes it all the more likely that Matthew's description of the Galilean appearances are at least in part derived from Mark. In fact, it reads well if you tag onto the end of Mark some verses from Matthew 28. Taking a bare minimum, in fact, you would get this, where the material flows from Mark 16:8 seamlessly into the words from Matthew:

As they entered the tomb, they
saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were
alarmed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene,
who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid
him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into
Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’” Trembling and
bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to
anyone, because they were afraid.

Suddenly Jesus met them.
“Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then
Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee;
there they will see me.”... Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the
mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him;
but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven
and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all
nations”.

I've minimised material taken from Matthew, just to show how it flows. I could have used more. It gives an impression of what the original ending of Mark could very possibly have looked like. I am not saying it was so, just that it could have been so, given that it flows naturally, and that this delivers what Mark promises, and that Matthew reuses 95% of Mark's material, so the wording in the latter paragraph above, which is found in Matthew, could have been derived from Mark's original ending.

[1] The
argument that Mark 16:9-20 should be dismissed is actually a kind of
fundamentalist version of scepticism. Its basic premise is that the Bible
should exclude any additional material found to be attached to the ‘original’
version of a gospel. Quite why this should be so is never clear to me. The
Bible itself is a compilation of different books. And Luke’s Gospel announces
boldly at its start that it is a sort of compilation itself, making one long
gospel from other writers’ shorter attempts. So the Bible itself announces in
various ways that it is fine to be a compilation and still be an inspired
religious text. Nevertheless, one finds this kind of fundamentalism that says
compilation is not fine, that compilation is a kind of naughty tampering with
the text, and so Mark 16:9-20 has no place in the Bible. But for the sake of
this post, I am merely interested to see what the end of Mark’s Gospel looks
like without Mark 16:9-20.